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Saturday, December 31, 2005

Margaret Thatcher appointed Victor Rothschild as her unofficial security adviser. In 1994, Roland Perry's book The Fifth Man claimed that Victor Rothschild may have helped Israel to gain important nuclear secrets. http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/perry.html

Jonathan Freedland, 31 10 2003, in The Guardian:

"(Margaret Thatcher had) a Cabinet which included no fewer than five Jews: Lord (David) Young, Malcolm Rifkind, Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson and Keith Joseph. "More old Estonians than old Etonians," joked the aged Harold Macmillan, a gag that struck many as an attempt by the old Tory guard to set a limit on Jewish progress." Guardian Unlimited The Guardian Profile: Michael Howard

From Jewish tribal review: "As half of one percent of the British population, Jews in the Margaret Thatcher era held 5 of 20 cabinet positions. Her high office Jewish contingent included Nigel Lawson (Chancellor, who resigned over the "Westland Affair"), Leon Brittan (Trade and Industry Secretary), David Young (Minister without portfolio, Malcolm Rifkind (Foreign Secretary), and Keith Joseph...

"I was born to a Lithuanian father and am of Jewish descent," noted Minister David Young.

"My only brother, Stewart, is chairman of the BBC. My father used to say, 'One son deputy chairman of the government, another chairman of the BBC -- that's not bad for immigrants."

Foreign Office officials were so concerned about Margaret Thatcher's pro-Israeli sympathies when she became Tory leader they wanted her to break off links with local Jewish groups, according to newly-released official papers.

Files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, under the 30 year rule reveal that diplomats feared she would be seen by Arab countries as a "prisoner of the Zionists".

One official even suggested that she should give up her Finchley parliamentary seat in north London - with its large Jewish community - for somewhere more palatable to Arab opinion.

The issue of Thatcher's membership of groups such as the Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley and Conservative Friends of Israel was raised during a visit by shadow foreign secretary Lord Carrington to Jordan in 1975.

"He asked the ambassador's advice on this and was assured that such a connection, which would inevitably do much harm in the Arab world, should if at all practicable be severed," noted Michael Tait, an official in the British embassy.

"Carrington agreed that Mrs Thatcher might most painlessly and with some justification get herself off the hook by resigning from all constituency obligations of this sort on the grounds of the rather wider obligations she has now to assume.

"Such a stratagem might resolve the problem in Finchley but if Mrs Thatcher is indeed a prime mover in a wider parliamentary grouping of pro-Israeli MPs then the difficulty would be trickier to bypass.

"While we as Government and not opposition officials may have no particular brief on Mrs Thatcher's behalf it is presumably in the national interest to do what we can to counter Arab fears and suspicions that the leader of HM opposition is already a prisoner of the Zionists."

December 25, 2005 -- The big predicted Civil War in Iraq now looms on the horizon! On December 23, a number of Sunni Muslim candidates who took part in Iraqi elections were disqualified to sit in the new parliament because they are considered by the neo-cons in the Bush administration and their puppets in Baghdad as "rejectionists" and past Baath Party officials. There was also widespread election fraud in populous Baghdad where the Shi'a vote was greater than their overall population. This type of manipulative electoral fraud is another major tenet of the global fascist neo-con movement and is wedded to the Jabotinskyite/Straussian underpinnings of the ideology. Neo-con electoral fraud has been practiced successfully in Florida, Ohio, Australia, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, and more recently, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a "made in US and Israel" constitution was approved with Soviet-style results. (83 percent "yes" nationwide with highly dubious "yes" majorities of 100 percent in Kivu, where Israeli diamond, gold, and coltan exploiters rule the day through Rwandan intermediaries). As with the case of the Sunni vote in Baghdad, the "No" vote in populous Kinshasa was deflated.

December 29, 2005 -- Latin America preparing for the "Yanqui invasion." U.S. positions military forces in Latin America to confront the surge of popular socialism in the Western Hemisphere. The Bush administration and its Congressional allies, consisting of right-wing Cuban-Americans like Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Christian fundies who tout the imperialist line of televangelist Pat Robertson, are backing the Pentagon's plans to expand its military presence in Latin America. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has authorized the expansion of U.S. military bases -- called Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs) -- the Mariscal Estigarribia airbase in Paraguay near the Bolivian and Brazilian borders, Eloy Alfaro International Airport in Manta, Ecuador; Comalapa International Airport in El Salvador; the Soto Cano Air Base in Comayagua, Honduras, "Plan Colombia" military installations throughout Colombia, covert bases in Peru, Reina Beatrix International Airport in Aruba; and Hato International Airport in Curacao...

The Bush administration is trying to cobble together a Latin American "coalition of the willing" to take on progressive governments in Latin America, including those of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Cuba whose ranks may swell in 2006 to include populist governments in Nicaragua, Peru, and Mexico. For that reason, the U.S. Southern Command is planning a saber-rattling military exercise in Paraguay in 2006 called "Fuerzas Comando 06." Although the Pentagon has invited some 20 Latin militaries to participate, Brazil's military chiefs see the United States as their primary security threat. The Brazilian military (as well as Venezuela's) is keeping a close eye on U.S. military activity in Guyana near the Brazilian border. Brazil's armed forces have also held a training exercise called Operation Jauru that was partly targeted against any future U.S. military incursions from Paraguay into Brazil, Bolivia, or Argentina. Brazil is coordinating with the militaries of its progressive neighbors to counter the U.S. military threat to Brazil and its neighbors.

December 28, 2005 -- BREAKING NEWS. NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.

The journalist surveillance program, code named "Firstfruits," was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception" program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.

Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen, the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, UPI's John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about NSA for The Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Thursday, December 29, 2005

John Stonehouse was a cabinet minister in the government of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. In 1974 Stonehouse faked his own death and disappeared to Australia. In 1969 a Czech security agent Joseph Frolik defected to the Americans. He later alleged that Stonehouse was a Czech agent.

"The CIA's specific contributions to the destabilization of Wilson included the agency's sponsorship of a book written by a Czech defector named Josef Frolik. This tome accused John Stonehouse, the Postmaster General in Wilson's cabinet, of being an east bloc agent."

A pile of clothing belonging to the MP was found on a Miami waterfront after he had supposedly entered the water for a swim. Despite the absence of a corpse and FBI suspicions that the British politician, a former minister of aviation whose heavily indebted business empire stretched to 23 separate companies, had been the victim of a Mafia hit, it was rapidly accepted that Stonehouse had committed suicide. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article335466.ece

~~~

"The 1975 Downing Street file on the Stonehouse affair released (0n 29 December 2005) by the National Archives at Kew in south-west London confirms that he not only left a wife and daughter behind but a Department of Trade inquiry into what happened to £1.25m he had raised from the British Bangladeshi community for flood relief."

Monday, December 26, 2005

"My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group's firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush." - Peter Dale Scott

The Global Drug Meta-Group:Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11

By Peter Dale Scott (18,734 words) 10/29/05

Peter Dale Scott believes that governments with global pretensions will avail themselves, in pursuit of their own political ends, of the resources, both financial and political, of the drug traffic.

Dale Scott suggests that the highly integrated drug traffic industry... requires that in major growing areas there must be limited state control, a condition most easily reached by fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private armies. This is the on-going situation of designed violence in every major growing area, from Lebanon to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan.

Dale Scott suggests that there exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin "family" in the Kremlin, but allegedly, according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.

Dale Scott reports on an alleged meeting which took place in July 1999 in southern France near Nice, at the villa in Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called "the richest man in the world." Those at the meeting allegedly included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany. Between them they allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with:

1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind of 9/11 and senior mentor to Osama bin Laden.2) Soviet military intelligence.3) the FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group that has become increasingly involved in the drug traffic.4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly involved group.5) (according to a well-informed Russian source) the CIA.

The bombs in Moscow in 1999.

Dale Scott suggests that certain stories indicate that the well-connected drug-trafficking meta-group, with connections to both the Kremlin and the CIA, arranged in advance for the bombings.

More extracts from the article:

From Pravda.info:

There have been reports in mass media about the involvement of the U.S. military in Afghanistan in drug trafficking. I asked the well-known political scientist and specialist on organized crime Vladimir Filin to comment on this.

-Vladimir Ilyich, is it true that Americans are involved in drug business?

-Yes, they are in ideal situation for this. They control the Bagram airfield from where the Air Force transport planes fly to a U.S. military base in Germany. In the last two years this base became the largest transit hub for moving Afghan heroin to other US bases and installations in Europe. Much of it goes to Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia. From there the Kosovo Albanian mafia moves heroin back to Germany and other EU countries.

-Why such a complex arrangement?

Drug traffickers enjoy relative safety in military bases. There is no serious control there. German police cannot work there. However, outside of military bases German law-enforcement is in effect. True, any police can be bought. But the level of corruption in Germany is not as high as, say, in Russia. This is why it is more convenient for Americans to establish distribution centers in other places. I believe that, in time, such centers will move to their military installations in Poznan, Poland, and also in Romania and Bulgaria. Poland is already a EU member. Romania and Bulgaria are expected to be in 2007. Corruption in these countries is almost as high as in Russia.

-How big is American drug traffic to Europe and who is behind it?

-About 15-20 tons of heroin a year. When Poznan become open, I think it could rise to 50, even 70 tons. Behind this business are the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). Actually, this is what they did already in Indochina in the 1960s-70s and in Central America in the 1980s.[96]

...In the wake of 9/11, Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, has claimed to possess information linking the American 9/11, and much else, to massive drug-trafficking which has corrupted high level U.S. officials. Among other things, she has claimed that the U.S. has never gone after top-level drug traffickers, because:

this would upset "certain foreign relations." But it would also expose certain of our elected officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and weapons-smuggling – and thus with the criminal underground, even with the terrorists themselves.....[113] ...

My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group's firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science and a Nobel Peace Prize finalist, wrote about famine in Mao's China:

“So, the famine was intentional. What was its human cost? I had estimated that 27 million Chinese starved to death or died from associated diseases. Others estimated the toll to be as high as 40 million. Chang and Halliday put it at 38 million and, given their sources, I will accept that,” said Rummel. “I’m now convinced that Stalin exceeded Hitler in monstrous evil, and Mao beat out Stalin.”

The Puerto Rican Cancer Experiment was undertaken by Dr. Cornelius Rhoads. Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, Rhoads purposely infected his subjects with cancer cells. Thirteen of the subjects died. When the experiment was uncovered, and in spite of Rhoads' written opinions that the Puerto Rican population should be completely eradicated, Rhoads went on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama. He later was named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and was at the heart of the recently revealed radiation experiments on prisoners, hospital patients, and soldiers (these are covered in the ACHE report. http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/radiation/)

1950:

The U.S. Navy sprayed a cloud of bacteria over San Francisco. The Navy claimed that the bacteria were harmless, and used only to track a simulated attack, but many San Francisco residents became ill with pneumonia-like symptoms, and one is known to have died.

1950 - 1953:

An array of germ warfare weapons was allegedly used against North Korea. Accounts claim that there were releases of feathers infected with anthrax, fleas and mosquitoes dosed with Plague and Yellow Fever, and rodents infected with a variety of diseases. These were precisely the same techniques developed by Japan scientists during WW2. Japanese biowar scientists were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for the results of that research. The Eisenhower administration later pressed Sedition Charges against three Americans who published reports of these activities. However, none of those charged were convicted.

1955:

The Tampa Bay area of Florida experienced a sharp rise in Whooping Cough cases, including 12 deaths, after a CIA test where a bacteria withdrawn from the Army's Chemical and Biological Warfare arsenal was released into the environment. Details of the test are still classified.

1956 - 1958:

In Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida, the Army carried out field tests in which mosquitoes were released into residential neighborhoods from both ground level and from aircraft. Many people were swarmed by Mosquitoes, and fell ill, some even died. After each test, U.S. Army personnel posing as public health officials photographed and tested the victims. It is theorized that the mosquitoes were infected with a strain of Yellow Fever. However, details of the testing remain classified.

1966:

The U.S. Army dispensed a bacillus, Serratia Marcescens, throughout the New York City subway system. Materials available on the incident noted the Army's justification for the experiment was the fact that there are many subways in the (former) Soviet Union, Europe, and South America. Serratia Marcescens was banned in 1970 as being too hazardous to use on "friendly" populations.

1969:

On June 9, 1969, Dr. D.M. McArtor, then Deputy Director of Research and Technology for the Department of Defense, appeared before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations to request funding for a project to produce a synthetic biological agent for which humans have not yet acquired a natural immunity. Dr. McArtor asked for $10 million dollars to produce this agent over the next 5-10 years. The Congressional Record reveals that according to the plan for the development of this germ agent, the most important characteristic of the new disease would be "that it might be refractory [resistant] to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease". AIDS first appeared as a public health risk ten years later, appearing first in a population of gay men who had been subjects in a test of a new Hepatitis vaccine. In 1989, work by Alan Cantwell Jr., M.D. linking AIDS to the hepatitis B viral vaccine experiments was suppressed at the 1989 AIDS International Conference by officials of the World Health Organization.

1974:

National Security Study memorandum 200, signed by Henry Kissenger. This document declared that overpopulation of the world posed a grave threat to the nation and urged the imposition of population control measures wherever possible.

An organization in Belgium called the "World Federation Of Doctors who value life" claims to have discovered a sterilizing agent in the tetanus vaccines being used in third world nations by the World Health Organization.

1981:

More than 300,000 Cubans were stricken with dengue hemorrhagic fever. An investigation by the magazine 'Covert Action Information Bulletin', which tracks the workings of various intelligence agencies around the world, suggested that this outbreak was the result of a release of mosquitoes by Cuban counterrevolutionaries. The magazine tracked the activities of one CIA operative from a facility in Panama to the alleged Cuban connections. During the last 30 years, Cuba has been subjected to an enormous number of outbreaks of human and crop diseases which are difficult to attribute to purely natural causes.

1982:

El Salvadoran trade unionists claimed that epidemics of many previously unknown diseases had cropped up in areas immediately after U.S. directed aerial bombings.

1985:

An outbreak of Dengue fever struck Managua Nicaragua shortly after an increase of U.S. aerial reconnaissance missions. Nearly half of the capital city's population was stricken with the disease, and several deaths were attributed to the outbreak. It was the first such epidemic in the country and the outbreak was nearly identical to that which struck Cuba a few years earlier (1981). Dengue fever variations were the focus of much experimentation at the Army's Biological Warfare test facility at Ft. Detrick, Maryland prior to the 'ban' on such research in 1972.

Friday, December 23, 2005

... You were the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000.

At this very moment Dutchman Frans van Anraat is accused in a Hague trial, being charged for delivering chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. These weapons are claimed to have killed thousands of Kurds at Halabja in 1988.

As we both, like many others already know this is absolute rubbish, since the mustard gas delivered by van Anraat did not kill the Kurds at Halabja...

The substance believed to have killed the Kurds at Halabja is a 'blood agent’, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), better know as 'Zyklon B’ of the Germans in WWII.

Among many others you tell (passim) that it was not the Iraqis, who zyklonb’d the Kurds at Halabja, and besides of this that Saddam Hussein is not guilty of the accused genocide as the use of gas occured in a battle action.

Your claim that the Iraqis would have used cyanide gas would not make sense anyway, just because of the following points:

(1) the Iraqis did not have nor did they use the cyanide gas at the time (rather: any time).

(2) why would the Iraqis have attacked their own city and own people?

(3) why did they not use the gas against the attacking Iranians instead?

The innocence of Frans van Anraat, Iraqis and Saddam Hussein to the gassing of the Kurds leaves us with several open questions. One of them is who then used cyanide gas against the civilian inhabitants of Halabja?.....

1) Was it Iran, who used cyanide gas against Iraqi Kurds, and were the Iranians assisted in this by the U.S. either with recommendations, delivering the gas, intelligence or what so ever, connecting the U.S. to the gassing of the Kurds?

Or 2) Was it U.S. itself (or some its ally, for example Israel), who used the cyanide gas at Halabja, but pointed the finger on Iran after this?

Or 3) Was U.S. using Jalal Talabani, an agent for them and ally of Iran, who – without Iranian knowledge of this – made the Iranians to use its own, home-made cyanide gas against the Kurdish civilians at Halabja?

Or 4) Was it so that, the DIA originally planned the operation at Halabja against both Iraq and Iran as follows: in first phase 'the Halabja genocide’ was intended to be used as a justification for a war against Iraq, as actually happened in 2003?

5) Was it further intended that after the Iraq war was won and Saddam convicted, the DIA investigation, showing that 'actually’ it was the Iranians, ("Oops, sorry Iraq, we made a little mistake here..."), who used cyanide gas? Which was, according to the plan, to be now used to start an successive war against Iran? (For a sketch for such a "radical right-wing agenda, cf. Iraq: The War To Start All Wars, http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/07/war-to-start-all-wars/)

6) Was it further so that Jalal Talabani double-crossed the Americans just few weeks ago, because he had by then understood that the second phase of war, the planned attack against Iran was not to happen, as actually the Iranians had already won the Iraq war?

7) Is it so that after Mr. Chalabi turned his coat once again, he arrived to the Iranian camp with the proofs of the U.S. involvement, or possibly with the conclusive proof of U.S. initiative in the use of the cyanide gas at Halabja?

8) Is this one of the reasons for the Iranians claiming now victory over the United States in Iraq, simply because the Iranians know that as they have a solid evidence against U.S., they’ve also gained an absolute immunity against any U.S. forgery aimed at starting a war against Iran, giving them also a guarantee against Israel?

9) Is it so that the U.S. must be very nice to Iran from now on, since it fears that Iran could (and would) leak the U.S. involvement at Halabja?

10) Is it so that the U.S. is now being blackmailed by Tehran? Wouldn’t it be much better to bring all the evidence out before the U.S. is gotten into a very big trouble because of it’s position in this?

If you are not able to answer these questions on your own name, I fully understand you. In that case I would however hope that you choose a nick-name and drop both the answers and the proofs of these question to the internet through channels that can not be tracked back to you. Not only me, but the entire world will be most thankful to you for doing this favor. My sincerest thanks to you already,

An investigation of poison gas attacks carried out by Saddam Hussein's regime two decades ago has led Dutch authorities to Maryland, where for more than 18 months they have been quietly gathering evidence about an international businessman's dealings with a now-defunct chemical manufacturer.

Their target is Frans Van Anraat, a Dutch citizen scheduled to stand trial in the Netherlands within weeks on charges of genocide and war crimes. Van Anraat, 63, is accused of supplying the Iraqi regime with thiodiglycol, a key ingredient in the mustard gas used to poison thousands of Iranians and ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq.

Van Anraat's thiodiglycol was manufactured in Baltimore by the chemical company Alcolac Inc., which, U.S. authorities say, effectively supplied both sides during the Iran-Iraq war. Alcolac pleaded guilty in 1989 to knowingly violating export laws in the case of a shipment of thiodiglycol that ultimately went to Iran.

The recent work of Dutch investigators here suggests that the trial will highlight the Maryland company's role, knowingly or not, in helping Saddam build his arsenal. The company has since been sold and restructured.

"Alcolac turned a blind eye to abundant evidence in its files that this chemical was not going to the final destination that its customers stated in documents filed with customs," said Martin S. Himeles Jr., the former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case against the company.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Last week Yosef Ardi published one of the most important posts, something so significant that I cannot leave it uncommented upon.

Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) said on Dec. 13th that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Indonesian state-run electric company PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) on the construction of the Southeast Asian country's first nuclear power plant.

They're going to spend a year on planning the whats and wheres.

"We hope to introduce our OPR-1000 class (light-water) reactor in Indonesia," KEPCO's spokesperson Park Yong-Seong said. KEPCO has developed the OPR 1000 class reactor, which refers to an optimized power reactor with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts."About the location, the possibilities include Madura (East Java) or Muria (Central Java), but if these proposals are turned down it will be no problem to move to earthquake-free Kalimantan," he said.

No problem? Ignoring the horrendous cost, the technological safety and waste storage/recycling factors, one can only hope that by 2017, when the plant is hoped to be ready for operation, no existing or emergent terrorist group will be tempted by the target.

And will a country with such poor infrastructure that it cannot even provide adequate public transport or household waste disposal facilities be able to ensure the required trained personnel?

Perhaps the most important issue, however, is the question of 'socialisation'. The Jakarta Post has no record of this deal in its archives, although on November 21st it reported on a meeting that SBY had with four major Korean conglomerates thus:

Susilo ... visited a nuclear power plant in Kori, which is managed by Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. Ltd., aiming at exploring the possibility of cooperating with Korea in developing a nuclear power plant at home to help reduce the country's dependency on plants fired by fossil-based sources.

Why the secrecy?One can only hope that commonsense will prevail, that alternative energy options, such as the abundant geothermal and solar sources, are thoroughly explored before setting out on a short-term energy project with immeasurably long-term consequences.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Someone ... who is not very happy this evening is Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto who has just been sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for planning the murder of a top (Indonesian)human rights activist, Munir, during a flight on the national carrier Garuda last year.

'Planning'?

I thought he was charged with the actual murder, through spiking Munir's juice with arsenic.

Whatever, it has always been clear that Polycarpus was being set up and this is verified by the current head of the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), Syamsir Siregar who, earlier today at the State Palace, said that it still hadn't been revealed who were behind Pollycarpus.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Ian Cobain, in The Guardian 17 December 2005, reported on Britain's secret torture centres in Germany. One of the torture centres was at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover. It was run by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), following the British occupation of north-west Germany in 1945.

At the torture camps, prisoners were emaciated and fearful like the victims of Belsen.

One Russian prisoner, Alexander Kalkowski, claimed he had been severely beaten and forced to spend eight hours a day in a cold bath.

Prisoners complained of thumbscrews and "shin screws".

In December 2005, Foreign Office files were opened after a request by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. These papers, and others declassified earlier, tell the story of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the Bad Nenndorf torture centre during the 22 months it operated before its closure in July 1947.

He describes how prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold; some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg.

Many of the prisoners were simply German leftists.

Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

One of the men who was starved to death, Walter Bergmann, had offered to spy for the British, and fell under suspicion because he spoke Russian.

Hayward reported: "There seems little doubt that Bergmann, against whom no charge of any crime has ever been made, but on the contrary, who appears to be a man who has given every assistance, and that of considerable value, has lost his life through malnutrition and lack of medical care".

Another man who starved to death, Franz Osterreicher, had been arrested with forged papers while attempting to enter the British zone in search of his gay lover. Hayward said that "in his struggle for existence or to get extra scraps of food he stood a very poor chance" at Bad Nenndorf.

Many of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were there for no reason at all.

One, a former diplomat, remained locked up because he had "learned too much about our interrogation methods".

Another arrived after a clerical error, and was incarcerated for eight months.

Hayward reported: "There are a number against whom no offence has been alleged, and the only authority for their detention would appear to be that they are citizens of a country still nominally at war with us."

Ingrid Groth, then a seven-year-old, said locals claimed that if you crept up to the barbed wire at night, you could hear the prisoners' screams.

MI5

According to The Guardian:

The commanding officer was Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, 45, a monocled colonel of the Peshawar Division of the Indian Army who had been seconded to MI5 in 1939, and who had commanded Camp 020, a detention centre in Surrey where German spies had been interrogated during the war.

An authoritarian and a xenophobe with a legendary temper, Stephens boasted that interrogators who could "break" a man were born, and not made. Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf, 12 were British, a combination of officers from the three services and civilian linguists. The remaining eight included a Pole and a Dutchman, but were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war, and who, Inspector Hayward suggested, "might not be expected to be wholly impartial".

...Some warders represented the more unruly elements of the British Army of the Rhine, sent to Bad Nenndorf after receiving suspended sentences for assault or desertion. Often, Hayward said, they were the sort of individuals "likely to resort to violence on helpless men".

The inmates were starved, woken during the night, and forced to walk up and down their cells from early morning until late at night. When moving about the prison they were expected to run, while soldiers kicked them. One warder, a soldier of the Welsh Regiment, told Hayward: "If a British soldier feels inclined to treat a prisoner decently he has every opportunity to do so; and he also has the opportunity to ill-treat a prisoner if he so desires".

The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that "the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation".

Former prisoners told Hayward that they had been whipped as well as beaten. This, the detective said, seemed unbelievable, until "our inquiries of warders and guards produced most unexpected corroboration". Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered "perfectly proper", on the grounds that such threats were never carried out.

Moreover, any prisoner thought to be uncooperative during interrogation was taken to a punishment cell where they would be stripped and repeatedly doused in water. This punishment could continue for weeks, even in sub-zero temperatures.

Naked prisoners were handcuffed back-to-back and forced to stand before open windows in midwinter. Frostbite became common.

One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar...an anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments," he said.

Kalkowski, the NKVD officer, claimed that toenails were ripped out and that he had been hung from his wrists during interrogation, with weights tied to his legs. British NCOs, he alleged, would beat him with rubber truncheons "while the interrogating officers went for lunch"...

Whatever was happening during the interrogations must have been widely known among many of the camp's officers and men. In common with every CSDIC prison, each cell was bugged, so that the prisoners' private utterances could be matched against their "confessions".

Inspector Hayward's investigation led to the courts martial of Stephens, Captain John Smith, Bad Nenndorf's medical officer, and an interrogator, Lieutenant Richard Langham. The hearings were largely held behind closed doors. A number of sergeants - men who had carried out the beatings - were told they would be pardoned if they gave evidence against their officers.

Langham, who had been born in Munich and fled to England with his parents in 1934, at the age of 13, denied that he had mistreated prisoners and was acquitted.

Charges of manslaughter against Smith were dropped but, after a court martial held entirely in secret, he was found guilty of the neglect of inmates andsentenced, at the age of 49, to be dismissed the service.

It is unclear whether any of Stephens's superiors knew, or condoned, what had happened at Bad Nenndorf, although his lawyers said they were prepared to spread the blame among senior army officers and Foreign Office officials. Before his court martial began there was nervous debate among ministers and government officials about how to avoid the repercussions which would follow, should the truth become known.

Ministers were anxious that nobody should learn that CSDIC was running a number of similar prisons in Germany.

There was also what the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Frank Pakenham, later to become Lord Longford, described as "the fact that we are alleged to have treated internees in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".

The army, meanwhile, said it was determined the Soviets should not discover "how we apprehended and treated their agents", not least because some would-be defectors might have second thoughts.

Finally, there was the inevitable fall-out for Attlee's Labour government. As Hector McNeill, foreign minister, pointed out in a memo to Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary: "I doubt if I can put too strongly the parliamentary consequences of publicity. Whenever we have any allegations to make about the political police methods in Eastern European states it will be enough to call out in the House 'Bad Nenndorf', and no reply is left to us."

Stephens ... was acquitted of two charges, two others were withdrawn, and he was free to apply to rejoin MI5.

The closure of Bad Nenndorf was not the end of the story, however. The archives reveal that three months later a custom-built interrogation centre, with cells for 30 men and 10 women, was opened near to the British military base at Gütersloh. The inmates were to be suspected Soviet spies, and would be medically examined before interrogation.

When Frank Pakenham complained that most of the interrogators had been at Bad Nenndorf, and demanded that "drastic methods" should not be employed, Major-General Sir Brian Robertson, the military governor, put his foot down.

Why, he exclaimed, if the military authorities were required to justify the arrest of each inmate, and then handle them according to the standards "enforced by the prison commissioners in our own enlightened country", there was little point in having an interrogation centre at all.

Death subterfuge

One of the most bizarre episodes at Bad Nenndorf followed the death of a former SS officer called Abeling. He had been so severely beaten during his arrest in January 1947 that he was unconscious on arrival at the prison, and died shortly afterwards.

The camp's officers instructed a local gravedigger to prepare a grave for a British officer who had died of an infectious disease. Abeling's corpse was sewn into a blanket, lowered in, and covered with quicklime. A firing party was on hand to ensure that the dead man was buried with full British military honours, and a white wooden cross with a false name was erected over the grave.

The reasons for such subterfuge are made clear in declassified Foreign Office papers at the National Archives. Abeling, formerly a member of an "annihilation squad" in Warsaw, had been working as an agent for the Americans at the time of his death, spying on his old Nazi comrades under the codename Slim.

The report notes that the Americans "insisted that 'Slim's' death must be kept a very closely guarded secret, because of the fact that the US authorities had been employing him in the full knowledge that he was wanted by the Polish government as a major war criminal".

Today the wooden cross over Abeling's grave has been replaced with a gravestone. It still bears the name of the man that local people believe to be buried there: John X White, born 1.8.1911, died 17.1.1947.

MI6 agents are accused of the kidnapping and “psychological torture” of 28 Pakistanis held in Greece.

A leading Greek lawyer has presented a dossier to parliament in Athens of the treatment of 28 detainees by MI6 officers. Frangiscos Ragoussis alleges that the detainees were hooded and held in secret.

The men, all of Pakistani origin, claim that they were threatened by two British agents who warned them that their families in Greece and the UK would suffer also if they dared complain about their treatment.

These allegations come at an awkward time for the Government, which is facing demands for an investigation into the CIA’s use of British airports to ferry al-Qaeda suspects to secret prisons in Europe and the Middle East.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, denied yesterday that British airports had been used by the United States for so-called “extraordinary rendition” flights taking terrorist suspects for interrogation in third countries.

If Greek MPs decide to investigate the claims of mistreatment British ministers may have to defend the behaviour of its agents abroad. Mr Blair insists that Britain’s security services do not use torture here or overseas.

Security chiefs have never said how many were detained at their request, or what happened to these suspects.

Most of the 28 detained in Greece are still too scared to say anything, but one, Hizar Hayet, 32, has claimed that he was questioned about a series of mobile telephone calls linked with some of the four London suicide bombers.

"Down through the years republicans have been unmasked as agents. Many died - their bodies dumped on the border... However, the last one survived. Freddie Scappaticci, deputy head of the IRA`s internal security unit, was unmasked as an alleged British agent - accused of being Stakeknife - in 2003." http://www.utvlive.com/newsroom/indepth.asp?id=68362&pt=n

"The Kincora Scandal first broke on 3 April 1980 when three staff members of the Kincora Boys Home, Belfast, were charged with acts of gross indecency. Allegations continued to be made that elements of the security service, civil servants and a number of Loyalists had been involved in the abuse of young boys at Kincora." CAIN: Chronology of the Conflict 1982

In a dramatic twist, Mr Donaldson, Sinn Fein`s former head of administration at Stormont, was expelled from the party as he owned up to working for British intelligence and the Royal Ulster Constabulary/Police Service of Northern Ireland Special Branch.

The 55-year-old echoed Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and said he did not believe there was a republican spy ring at Stormont.

"I was not involved in any republican spy ring in Stormont. The so-called Stormontgate affair was a scam and a fiction, it never existed, it was created by Special Branch," he said in a statement last night."I deeply regret my activities with British intelligence and RUC/PSNI special branch. I apologise to anyone who has suffered as a result of my activities as well as to my former comrades and especially to my family who have become victims in all of this."

Mr Donaldson approached a senior Sinn Fein official yesterday after being warned by the PSNI he was going to be exposed publicly as an agent and his life was in danger.

After the latest twist to the controversy over a spy ring, Mr Donaldson abandoned his home in Belfast for Dublin amid concerns about his safety.

In the statement he issued from a Dublin hotel, he said: "I was recruited in the 1980s after compromising myself during a vulnerable time in my life.

"Since then I have worked for British intelligence and the RUC/PSNI Special Branch. Over that period I was paid money."

His sensational expulsion from the party followed the controversial decision last week by the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland to withdraw a case against Mr Donaldson and two other men who were accused of being part of a spy ring at Stormont which led to the collapse of the power sharing executive three years ago.

In October 2002, he was arrested and charged with having documents likely to be of use to terrorists.His arrest, along with that of his son-in-law and a civil servant, became known as Stormontgate - a republican spy ring at the heart of government.

After the searches and allegations, the Northern Ireland Secretary moved to suspend devolution to stave off a unionist walkout on power sharing.

After the Public Prosecution Service dropped the case nine days ago, Mr Donaldson and Mr Adams moved to insist there was no republican spy ring at Stormont.

However, last night party leader Mr Adams admitted a different spying operation had gone on within the ranks of his own party.

Unionists have been calling for British Prime Minister Blair and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain to issue a statement explaining why the Public Prosecution Service withdrew the court case involving Mr Donaldson.

Nationalist SDLP deputy leader Dr Alasdair McDonnell said: "We suspected that the public interest argument was a way of covering up for an informer. We don`t know whether Denis Donaldson was that particular informer.There is the distinct possibility, like so many cases in the past, that he is being used as a scapegoat to cover someone else."

Mr Adams revealed he suspected there had been an informer within Sinn Fein`s ranks after the offices were raided in the police operation at Stormont.He claimed his suspicions heightened when the British failed to prosecute the three men arrested.

Down through the years republicans have been unmasked as agents. Many died - their bodies dumped on the border with an IRA bullet in the head.However, the last one survived. Freddie Scappaticci, deputy head of the IRA`s internal security unit, was unmasked as an alleged British agent - accused of being Stakeknife - in 2003. He denied the claim before he left Northern Ireland amid fears for his life.

According to The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/15/nlib115.xml "Moderniser Mark Oaten, 41, is courted as a voice of the future at Westminster but needs to bolster his image among the Left-leaning activists who make up the bulk of the party. Former parliamentary aide to Mr Kennedy, his supporters are widely blamed for rumours undermining the leader, who he has pledged never to stand against. Currently home affairs spokesman, the affable Mr Oaten is known to feel he needs more time to develop his leadership ambitions. Key player in the Orange Book group of MPs who want the party to take a more economically-liberal, Right-wing direction."

Things had looked more promising last November when Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy attacked David Blunkett's use of a "climate of fear" to introduce some "extremely repressive measures". His home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten has now undermined that position.

On BBC Radio 4's The Week in Westminster on Saturday morning, listeners heard the government's proposals being attacked by Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews but were also treated to the shameful spectacle of these proposals being given a fair wind by Mark Oaten. To the extent that Oaten opposed the government, his criticism was muted. (You can hear the programme online for the next seven days - fast-forward 9 minutes 35 seconds into the broadcast to find the relevant report).Marshall-Andrews made the right points and Oaten didn't, as these extracts from Saturday's radio broadcast show:

OATEN: "I welcomed what Charles Clarke said in the sense that at least we were now having a debate and the politicians were able to get into some of the detail, and there may very well be some measures that he is putting forward that the Lib Dems can support."

MARSHALL-ANDREWS: "I'm actually very disappointed to hear that the Liberal Democrats are giving any support at all to measures which are in fact infinitely worse than those that we have at the moment... For the first time for 300 years, what is being proposed here is executive arrest and detention without trial and indefinitely of British subjects... External threat has been the excuse used by authoritarian governments throughout history... The worst thing that terrorism does to you is not the threat that terrorists pose to us, it's what they induce us to do to ourselves."

OATEN: "What I've got to do as a politician and a Liberal is to try and juggle this complicated equation over making sure that on the one hand I defend those civil liberties but on the other hand that I am responsible and listen to the security threats. I think that the last Home Secretary had the balance completely wrong. What I'm indicating is that there may be a way in which we can redress that balance with this new Home Secretary but obviously there's a range of control orders that he's suggesting. Now there may be some of those which do not require a derogation [from the EU human rights convention], which we can live with. There may be other of those control orders, such as house detention, which if they do require a derogation we would have serious concerns about."

MARSHALL-ANDREWS: "The last Home Secretary, whose record on civil liberties was deplorable, probably the worst in modern memory, even the last Home Secretary never brought through proposals for the executive detention without trial of British citizens indefinitely. Now this is what it is. The fact that's it's not in Belmarsh and it happens to be in a bungalow is neither here nor there... One thing that I am absolutely certain about is that we did not have [during Blunkett's time as Home Secretary] an absence of terrorist attacks because of the erosion of civil liberty... Now if it is going to be suggested that those twelve people in Belmarsh are the effective reason why we have had no terrorist attacks, I simply do not accept it and I don't know anybody who has put that forward. But we were threatened by the IRA for effectively half a century. We never, never introduced measures of this kind."

OATEN: "What I have to do is to listen carefully to this change of announcements and that's got nothing to with general elections, it's got to do with sensible grown-up politics, to find a good way forward which can balance the civil liberty beliefs I have and I must take note of the security implications at the same time."

This was not simply a matter of a difference of opinion. Marshall-Andrews was not only logical but also expressed moral clarity and passion. Oaten, in contrast, expressed his views in mostly dessicated, administrative terms, as if this were nothing more than a question of weighing up some technical details.

His talk of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" betrayed a belief that fundamental values are tradeable. He then had the nerve to co-opt the language of responsibility with his tendentious reference to "sensible grown-up politics".

Oaten's problem, as his reference to a "complicated equation" showed, is that he has accepted the false premise of authoritarianism, that civil liberty and security exist in inverse proportion to one another.

Consequently, his argument with the government has become a matter of degree rather than a principled disagreement.What distinguishes a liberal political party should, above all, be its liberalism.

The government's proposals are not about administrative efficiency or our security but instead strike at the heart of our political values and our liberties.

Any Liberal Democrat MP who does not understand this fundamental point is unfit to serve as a frontbench spokesperson.

When a Law Lord and a Labour MP can demonstrate a better grasp of liberalism and express it in forthright terms, while our parliamentary spokesman ends up batting for the opposition, what hope is there?

I first realised Mr Kennedy's unfitness to lead when the party had to campaign against the illegal Iraqi invasion, despite Mr Kennedy rather than because of him. For months prior to the invasion, we urged him to lead the opposition to the war but he refused, stating he was not against the war but in favour of the UN.

Anything else?

When the party voted to end the corrupt practice of Liberal Democrat peers working as political lobbyists, he threatened legal action against those who complained about the continuing practice. Indeed, Lord Clement-Jones, who was employed as a political lobbyist by the notorious Cayman Islands tax haven, has just been made the party's federal treasurer, and Lord Razzall was put in charge of the general election campaign which called for fairer taxation, despite his being a director of a company in the Channel Islands tax haven.

But where would you say he stands on the political spectrum?

Whilst unbelievably downplaying the war in the run-up to the general election, his lieutenants, instead of building on the successful centre-left progressive coalition that had won so many Tory seats, embarked on a policy of "sounding more Tory", which ended in total failure at the election. This lurch to the right was heralded by the publication of the infamous Orange Book, which, despite Kennedy's written introduction, was derided across the party as a right-wing Blairite manifesto. Nevertheless, Kennedy placed the core Orange Book authors Vince Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten into key positions of power. Britain does not need or deserve three centre-right parties.

What about the vision thing?

Finally, there is Mr Kennedy's unwillingness to take a clear position on most issues. Indeed, this was claimed to be an advantage by his aides, who said it meant voters from both sides of issues ended up supporting him. This is political nonsense. Constructive politics is about advocating policies that will benefit the wider good. A party has to campaign on its policies if it is to persuade the public of their value. The party has a range of crucial progressive liberal policies such as a renewable energy economy, creating a fairer democracy, an effective drugs strategy and so on, yet the leadership refuses to encourage grassroots campaigning on these.

But he won votes, surely?

After the general election, Kennedy distracted attention from his failure to make a major breakthrough by launching a profoundly dishonest attack on his own party activists who had just worked their hearts out. He blamed them for foisting unpopular policies on the party which had been attacked by our opponents in the election. The real truth was that these policies were included in papers submitted by Mr Kennedy's own Federal Policy Committee.

And the future?

Unless the leadership passes to people with political integrity and campaigning talent, the Liberal Democrat Party will miss the enormous opportunity that it currently has to lead Britain to a better future.So here lies Charles Kennedy.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

December 13, 2005 -- Halliburton's connection to low wage slave trading in the Middle East and espionage inside the Vice President of the United States' White House office.

Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, has some interesting partners in its work in occupied Iraq. On Dec. 11, WMR reported on links between Halliburton/Kellogg, Brown & Root and a Viktor Bout-owned airline based in Moldova, Aerocom/Air Mero. Bout's airlines have also reportedly been involved in flying low wage earners from East Asia to Dubai and on to Iraq where they work for paltry salaries in sub-standard living conditions. Halliburton/KBR has sub-contracted to a shadowy Dubai-based firm, Prime Projects International Trading LLC (PPI), which "trades" mainly in workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and other poor Asian nations.

In 2004, after a Filipino PPI worker was killed in a mortar attack on Camp Anaconda in Iraq, the Philippines government of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ordered PPI, which is based at P.O. Box 42252, Dubai, UAE, to send overseas Filipino workers OFWs) home from Iraq and Kuwait and banned it from further recruiting in the Philippines. Some of PPI's recruiting included running ads on the Internet. In addition to the other south Asian employees, the Philippine workers were employed by PPI under a Pentagon sweetheart umbrella contract let to KBR under the LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) III program.

Although little is known about PPI, it reportedly has been linked to Halliburton/KBR for a number of years and has been associated with Halliburton contracts in the Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Balkans during the time when Dick Cheney headed the firm. PPI has also been involved in operations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Filipino workers were involved in building the prison housing suspected "Al Qaeda" prisoners.

Inside sources report that PPI has some high level financial partners, including the al Nahayan royal family of the United Arab Emirates and Vice President Cheney. And there are connections to President Macapagal-Arroyo's ordering the repatriation of hundreds of Filipino workers home from Iraq and Kuwait and the discovery that U.S. Marine Corps and FBI spy Leandro Aragoncillo, a Filipino-American who worked as a Marine security aide inside Cheney's office until early 2002 and who was arrested by the FBI this past October, had stolen dossiers from Cheney's office that were considered damaging to Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo. Macapagal-Arroyo was sworn in as President on January 20, 2001 (the same day George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were sworn in) after a popular revolution ousted Joseph Estrada. Macapagal-Arroyo, the daughter of past Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal.

Aragoncillo passed Cheney's reports on Macapagal-Arroyo, some of which were obtained from National Security Agency intercepts, to Estrada, a political opponent of Macapagal-Arroyo and an ally of former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos. Estrada was planning a coup against Macapagal-Arroyo with U.S. support. Aragoncillo was linked to another U.S.-based Filipino spy -- former Philippine National Police officer Michael Ray Aquino -- who was also involved in passing Cheney's classified documents to Estrada. Aquino, who is wanted in the Philippines for involvement in murder, kidnapping, and drug trafficking, was also arrested by the FBI.

More importantly, Aquino's close friend, Estrada, is also a business associate of indicted GOP lobbyist/reputed gangster Jack Abramoff. Another high-level Filipino-American in the White House, Karl Rove's Assistant and Assistant to the President, Susan Bonzon Ralston, also served as Abramoff's personal assistant at the law firms Preston Gates & Ellis and Greenberg Traurig. Ralston has been called to testify before the grand jury and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the name of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson to the media.

Aragoncillo allegedly passed over 100 documents from a classified FBI computer system at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey while working there as an intelligence analyst for the FBI after he left the Marine Corps. It is significant that Aragoncillo admitted to spying while only working as an aide to Cheney and not when he worked for Vice President Al Gore during 1999 and 2000.It now seems apparent that Aragoncillo and Aquino were part of an illegal Cheney covert operation to topple Macapagal-Arroyo in retaliation for her stopping PPI's recruiting efforts in the Philippines. That decision by Manila dealt a severe financial blow to the Halliburton/KBR LOGCAP profits in Iraq. It is also of note that Aragoncillo worked with national Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

What was not anticipated by Cheney was that the FBI would step in and arrest Aragoncillo for culling classified information from the FBI's computers at Fort Monmouth. This case, like the AIPAC espionage case involving top Pentagon officials, has been largely ignored by the media. However, along with the Plame case and AIPACgate, all roads lead back to Cheney's office at the White House.

December 14, 2005 -- Yesterday, WMR reported on Vice President Dick Cheney's involvement with a Philippine espionage ring operating out of his White House office that provided Philippine opposition figures with damaging classified information on President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gleaned from U.S. intelligence sources, including communications intercepts. Cheney was miffed that a company tied to his old firm Halliburton was prevented by Macapagal-Arroyo from employing and recruiting thousands of low wage slaves from the Philippines for dangerous work in Iraq.

Today, there are reports from Manila that a retired general, Fortunato Abat, has illegally named a "transition government" to replace that of Macapagal-Arroyo.Arroyo-Macapagal was in Kuala Lumpur attending an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit at the time of the coup attempt. Last week, the building housing the offices of Macapagal-Arroyo's husband was strafed by gunfire and the leader of a 2003 attempted coup against Macapagal-Arroyo, Marine Captain Nicanor Faeldon, was allowed by his military guards to escape from prison and join Abat's forces. Last May, there was yet another military uprising against Macapagal-Arroyo.

U.S.-influenced media in the Philippines is calling for the President to step down, citing dubious opinion polls. It appears that even revelations that Mr. Cheney's "work up" on Macapagal-Arroyo and provision of sensitive U.S. intelligence to Philippine opposition forces did not dissuade him from continuing his plan to topple Macapagal-Arroyo and replace her with a client willing to send Filipino workers back to Iraq. That plan is currently underway in the Philippines and a military government is looming on the horizon.

December 13, 2005 The Gambia is the international limelight again as the center of an international mafia ring. In a masterpiece investigative report, The Wayne Madsen Report unraveled a network of weapons smugglers and mobsters operating in the heart of the Gambian Capital, working hand in hand with the Gambian leader, President Yahya Jammeh.

In reference to the Gambia, the report stated thus:

"There is also now interest in the activities of Richard T. Hines, the head of the powerful Republican lobbying firm RTH Consulting, Inc. Hines, a South Carolina native and a protege of the late GOP dirty trickmeister Lee Atwater, was one of the architects of the dirty tricks campaign by Bush against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary. A confederate of Abramoff in the 1980s Reagan administration's covert support network for the Nicaraguan contras, Angolan UNITA guerrillas, and Afghan mujaheddin, Hines is active in various Confederacy resurgence organizations, many of which have clear racist agendas.However, that has not prevented Hines from becoming the lobbyist for Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh, a military officer who overthrew Gambia's democratically-elected President Sir Dawda K. Jawara in a 1994 military coup supported by the United States Navy. Hines inherited the lobbying contract for Gambia from the eclectic Washington lobbyist Edward von Kloberg III, an individual who represented Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Liberia's Samuel K. Doe, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, Congolese leader Laurent Kabila, the exiled King Kigeli V of Rwanda, and Saddam Hussein. Last May, von Kloberg took a swan dive off of a castle in Rome, allegedly committing suicide after a spat with a gay partner. The connections between Hines and Gambia are important since the small narrow West African country is also a major base of operations for notorious Russian international arms smuggler Viktor Bout. The Gambia is the headquarters for one of many of Bout's front companies -- companies that are used to smuggle everything from weapons to diamonds and mercenaries to international relief supplies. In fact, Bout was the character on whom fictional arms smuggler Yuri Orlov, played by Nicolas Cage in the movie Lord of War, was largely based. Bout's connections with the Christian Right do not end with Gambia. Bout was Liberian dictator Charles Taylor's primary arms and diamond smuggler. Bout and his associates were given Liberian diplomatic passports and, with Taylor's blessing and protection, they registered a number of their front companies in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. Taylor, who is now in exile in Nigeria, was a business partner with Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson. Robertson's organization mentored both Ralph Reed and Richard Hines. According to British and Israeli intelligence sources, Taylor also enabled Al Qaeda to launder blood diamonds for cash through Liberia. Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone were where Israeli mobsters engaged in business with Israeli gangsters who operated under the full protection of the Israeli Likud government. Before Likud began purging Mossad of experienced intelligence officers with ties to the Israeli Labor Party, the Israeli-Al Qaeda diamond financial connection in West Africa was being pointed out by those officers as suicidal for Israeli interests. However, Taylor and Bout had powerful interests in the United States: a combination of the Christian Right and pro-Likud organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), both of which ignored and continue to ignore Israeli organized crime connections to Al Qaeda and terrorism. Robertson and Taylor were business partners in a Cayman Islands front company called Freedom Gold, Ltd. In fact, Freedom Gold bas headquartered at Robertson's CBN offices in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Robertson's African interests also crossed paths with Bout's in another country -- the former Zaire. Robertson's African Development Company used the cover of Robertson's tax-exempt "Operation Blessing" to ferry conflict diamonds out of civil war-ravaged Zaire (now Congo). A UN Security Council report dated November 30, 2005, lists Bout's Gambia New Millennium Air Company as having its address at the residence of Hines' client Jammeh: State House, Banjul, Gambia. The UN report states, "The Director of this firm is Baba Jobe, who is already listed on the Liberia Sanctions Committee's assets freeze list. According to a commercial aviation database, the firm acted as a cover for Victor Bout's operations. Its one aircraft, a Russian-made passenger jet, was acquired from Centrafrican Airlines." It is noteworthy that Hines's client, President Jammeh, just took possession of the Russian-made VIP presidential passenger jet, an Ilyushin IL-62 (C5-GNM) [Gambia] (formerly CCCP-86511 [USSR], RA-86511 [Russia], 3D-RTI [Swaziland], TL-ACL [Central African Republic]). And also of interest is the owner of the presidential aircraft: it is none other than Gambia New Millennium Air, the Bout-owned company listed on the UN Security Council freeze list and which is headquartered at Jammeh's State House in Banjul, the Gambian capital. In fact, the plane had been previously registered to Bout front companies in Swaziland and the Central African Republic. The Gambia: Joins Gabon and Swaziland as another African playground for the GOP Mafia Bout, who flew arms and passengers from Dubai and other locations to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan prior to 9-11, is now providing air services in post-Taliban Afghanistan as well as U.S.-occupied Iraq. Bout's transactions with the Taliban were handled by Vial, Inc., a firm based in Delaware. One of Bout's closest associates is the Russian-Israeli Odessa-born crime boss Leonid Minin, an Israeli national who, according to the UN Security Council, travels on forged German passports as well as legal Israeli, Russian, Greek, and Bolivian passports under at least ten aliases. It is also noteworthy that many of Bout's operations are based in Eastern European countries that have been mentioned in association with the rendition and transporting of CIA prisoners. Bout's numerous Russian-built cargo and passenger planes have been seen at the same airports used by CIA flights. For example, Bright Aviation, a suspected Bout front, is based at Sofia Airport in Bulgaria. Bulgaria is believed to be one of the countries used by the CIA to house secret prisoners. Another Bout front, Moldtransavia SRL, is based in Chisinau, Moldova, another suspected stopover point for CIA flights. One Chisinau, Moldova-based Bout front company, Aerocom, which also does business as Air Mero, is contracted to fly for Kellogg, Brown & Root in Iraq and elsewhere. Aerocom has also been cited in UN and DEA reports for being involved in drug smuggling in Belize. Some law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe believe that the covert flights being operated by CIA contractors and Bout's companies in support of secret prisoner movement are also involved in smuggling drugs. After being subjected to news reports, Aerocom quickly changed its name last year. More ties that bind Bush cartel to Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli Mafia: Bush with Yahya Jammeh, dictator of the Gambia, the client of both GOP lobbyist and neo-Confederate Richard Hines and international arms smuggler Viktor Bout."

Please visit the The Wayne Madsen Report for complete story. Highly dependable sources in Banjul also informed AllGambian about recent arms purchase by the Jammeh regime from an undisclosed country, amounting to 4.3 million dalasis. This comes at the heels of a hard-hitting border impasse between the Gambia and Senegal. The stand-off almost paralyzed the Gambian economy and caused untold hardship on the average Gambian. Observers wondered how the Gambia gov can afford to spend on presidential jets and military hardware at this junction when the economy is in shambles.

There are two theories about why the anti-war leader of the UK Liberal-Democrats, Charles Kennedy, is being attacked by the media and by some of his own members of parliament.

Theory one is that Charles Kennedy is being attacked because he is seen as not being as effective as his rivals Blair and Cameron.

Theory two is that he is being attacked because he opposed the Iraq war. This theory suggests that agents of the security services within the media and within the Liberal-Democrat party may be gunning for Kennedy.

Among those who opposed the Iraq war were Germany's Schroeder, France's Chirac and the UK's Kennedy. Schroeder has now gone. Chirac has had to face riots which some people think were the work of neo-con agitators. Kennedy is under attack by the media.

There was ... anger directed at Mark Oaten, who has defended Mr Kennedy but whom MPs accused of planning a series of regional tours and putting a campaign team together in case Mr Kennedy should stand down. He told The Times last night that his tours were visits to police stations and prisons.

Mr Oaten sent a two-page e-mail to Lib Dem activists on Tuesday, the day the crisis erupted, describing his achievements as home affairs spokesman and inviting them to contact him. One Lib Dem said: "He has clearly pushed a green button somewhere."

The Liberal Democrats in no way underestimate the seriousness of the threats facing this country. The fact that we differ from the Government on how to tackle those threats does not mean that we do not recognise that the world has changed since 9/11 and that we now face a different problem of international terrorism.

It is worth putting on the record our acknowledgement of the fact that we all owe our intelligence services a enormous debt of respect and gratitude for their achievements in the past three or four years.

Sir Walter Menzies Campbell received a scholarship to Stanford University.

America, with its founding beliefs in freedom, justice and human rights, is our natural ally...

The Bush Administration denounces the abuse of human rights, but then casts them aside in the process called ‘extraordinary rendition’ in which suspects are removed to states where torture is known to be practised in the hope that they will provide information.

And all the while our government affects to have no interest in reports that aircraft engaged in such rendition regularly land and refuel in the United Kingdom.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

The pursuit of strategic interest, at the expense of freedom and human rights, carries a heavy price. Supports for repressive governments creates conditions in which extremism thrives. The manifest injustice of Guantanamo buttresses support for terrorism.

Prolonged detention without trial and without due process violates cardinal principles of justice. It is incumbent on Britain, and Europe, to speak out against these injustices.

The transatlantic alliance must be a relationship neither of rivalry, nor subservience, but a partnership of influence.

Lt. Col. Crispin Black MBE worked as an intelligence expert for the Ministry of Defence until 2002. His responsibilities included briefing No 10, work for COBRA, the government’s emergency committee, and long-term strategic analysis for the Joint Intelligence Committee.

He currently works for a private intelligence company.

Dr Bleher writes:

"The book is an interesting insight into the intelligence community in that his analysis is as flawed and shabby as the intelligence strategy he criticises. If people like him are our celebrated experts I hate to think what the competence level of the ordinary government or ministry of defence staff might be like...

"Black’s analysis in his book is best characterised by what it leaves out."

"He bemoans that Hussain Osman, one of the alleged 21 July bombers, “was able to escape from the country a few days later on the Eurostar after walking past his own wanted poster in Waterloo Station”.

"He makes no mention at all of HaroonRashidAswat, a suspected mastermind of the 7 July bombings, who left the UK unhindered and whom the British security services protected from being apprehended by their US counterparts because of his having been an MI6 informant. He resurfaced after being arrested in Zambia, but the trail has since gone cold again.

"When Black also wonders that “there must, for example, have been something about the profile of Siddique Khan [one of the alleged London bombers] that turned off the natural and often aggressive inquisitiveness of MI5 and Special Branch – despite the fact that his name had emerged out of an investigation into a potential Islamist extremist activity”, maybe he should enquire with MI6 whether this was for the same reasons."

Dr Behar writes: "We are told that four suicide bombers detonated explosives in London. Because they are all dead nobody has been charged with this crime and there will be no trial. We have to take the word of the intelligence services for it – the same intelligence services who lied to us over Iraq – or the police – the same police who lied to us about the Brazilian they shot on 22 July."

De Menezes.

"Black mentions him briefly, blaming it all on the high stress levels amongst the police at the time but contradicts himself by on the one hand acknowledging that“members of a police firearms unit shot eleven bullets at close range (three missed) while restraining and pushing Mr de Menezes to the ground”, whilst claiming a page later:“You need to kill him so convincingly and quickly so that no twitching in his body could possibly depress the switch (this is the reason behind what looked like overkill at Stockwell tube station).” The key words are “while restraining and pushing” – you can’t have it both ways."

Dr Behar writes that Black is helping to obscure the facts and muddy the waters.

Freedland writes: "I was interviewing a group of Muslim voters in Edinburgh, asking how the Iraq war had unsettled their political allegiances. One older man began telling me that he did not blame Tony Blair or even George Bush for the way things had turned out, because they were mere dupes of a more powerful force. The calamity of 9/11 was not all it seemed: the authors of that event were not the 19 hijackers, but more shadowy players, unknown even to Bush. Later, as he gave me a lift to the station, I asked who these secret powers might be. The answer was "rich Jewish people"....

Freedland refers to "Egyptian television's Ramadan treat in 2002: Horseman without a Horse, whose central theme was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the century-old forgery concocted by the Tsarist secret police which alleged a Jewish plot to take over the world."So, who are the masterminds behind the terror?

Who was behind the terror in Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s? Reportedly, it was the Pentagon.

It was the CIA that was behind the Greek colonels. It was reportedly friends of the CIA who were behind the bomb blasts in Italy.

Operation Gladio: the idea was for the security services of the West to kill innocent people and then blame this on others.

Gladio was about keeping the right-wing elite in power.

Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony:

'You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

85 people were killed on Aug. 2, 1980 in the bombing of the Bologna train station.

According to the Italian Senate, after its investigation in 2000, the bombers were later discovered to be "men inside Italian state institutions and ... men linked to the structures of United States intelligence."

The Bologna bomb was part of Gladio's "the strategy of tension" - fomenting fear to keep populations in thrall to "strong leaders" who will protect the nation from the ever-present terrorist threat.

The strategy of tension was also used by the CIA and its allies outside Europe. During the 1980s, right-wing death squads, trained and supplied by the United States, murdered tens of thousands of people in Central America. Indonesia's gestapo regiments were trained by the Pentagon...

From http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_article_nato_gladio_terrorism_strategy_of_tension.htmIn Belgium, in 1984 a bizarre operation occurred around Vielsalm in the Ardennes region. A squad of US Marines were parachuted into Belgium, and met by a member of the Belgian military intelligence. They hid for a fortnight before attacking the police station of Vielsalm, in a so-called Oesling exercise, killing a Belgian officer. One marine was injured during the operation, losing an eye. Initially the attack was passed off as terrorism, but was later proven to be the work of the American and Belgian military - as confirmed by the Senate investigations of 1991.Other attacks occured, where, as was the case in Vielsalm, arms and ammunition were taken. Arms that found their way subsequently to extremist groups.One central question in the Belgian Senate investigation into the stay-behind network was whether it had been involved in the so-called Brabant Massacres of the 1980s. These were a group of attacks that occured in the area around Brussels called Brabant over a period of two years. Jewellers, restaurants, and in a number of cases supermarkets were attacked by a gang of heavily armed and ruthless men. In all the attacks very small amounts of money were taken, while "at the same time massive brutality and professionalism was employed" [NATO's Secret Armies pg 139]. For example, on November 9th 1985 on a busy Saturday, three armed hooded men entered a supermarket and started shooting. Eight people were killed, some while trying to escape. The money taken from the raid amounted to a couple of thousand pounds, and was found dumped in a canal in an unopened sack... An official report published on the Brabant Massacres in 1990, before the discovery of the secret army network, had concluded that the killers had official links: “According to the report, the killers were members or former members of the security forces – extreme right-wingers who enjoyed high-level protection and were preparing a right-wing coup” [NATO’s Secret Armies, pg 145]

It is dangerous to think that one particular group is ruling the world. In Asia, it is the Chinese oligarchs who are accused of having too much economic power - whether in Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand. In the USA, half of the top 100 richest people are said to be Jewish. Many oligarchs are Arab and some are South American.

If there was a mysterious group behind 9 11, they were not necessarily all of the same race or religion. There could be alliances among fascists from many countries, such as the USA, Britain, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan....

Who might be the top people in this mysterious group?

Who was behind Operation Northwoods?

The Pentagon.

Have 'friends of Israel' increased their influence within the Pentagon and the US government?